Building an AI Short Video Generator: Why the Workflow Needs Skills, Not Just Prompts

Most AI short-form video demos skip the boring part. They show a finished TikTok, Reel, or YouTube Short. Maybe they show the prompt. Maybe they show the generated script or the final render. But the hard part is not making one video. The hard part is making the fifteenth video without the whole system turning into a pile of one-off scripts, half-remembered FFmpeg commands, broken captions, inconsistent hooks, and manual upload steps. That is where I think the conversation around AI video automation gets more interesting. Not: Can an AI generate a Short? But: What workflow does an AI agent need to generate Shorts repeatedly? I was looking at a Terminal Skills use case for building an AI short video generator, and the useful part is not the fantasy of "push one button, print infinite content." The useful part is the stack. The real job is a pipeline A short-form video generator sounds like one tool. In practice, it is a pipeline: topic research -> script -> voiceover -> footage or visual generation -> subtitles -> assembly -> platform formatting -> upload -> analytics Each step has different failure modes. Topic research can produce generic ideas. Scripts can be too long. Voice can drift from the brand. Footage can mismatch the narration. Subtitles can land under platform UI. FFmpeg can export a technically valid file that a platform still hates. Uploads can succeed in the API but fail the actual publishing workflow. If you try to solve all of that with one giant prompt, the agent has to keep too much operational knowledge in its head. That is fragile. The better pattern is to split the workflow into skills. What a skill gives the agent A skill is not just a code snippet. For this kind of workflow, a useful skill tells the agent: when to use this capability what inputs are expected what output should exist afterward what validation is required when to stop instead of pretending success That last point matters. For media automation, "the command ran" is not enough. Th